The-Tibetan-Book-of-Living-and-Dying

38 THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING
and that at every moment its nature is subtly changing. This is
what we mean when we say things are empty, that they have
no independent existence.
Modern science speaks to us of an extraordinary range of
interrelations. Ecologists know that a tree burning in the Amazon
rain forest alters in some way the air breathed by a citizen
of Paris, and that the trembling of a butterfly's wing in
Yucatan affects the life of a fern in the Hebrides. Biologists are
beginning to uncover the fantastic and complex dance of genes
that creates personality and identity, a dance that stretches far
into the past and shows that each so-called "identity" is composed
of a swirl of different influences. Physicists have introduced
us to the world of the quantum particle, a world
astonishingly like that described by Buddha in his image of
the glittering net that unfolds across the universe. Just like the
jewels in the net, all particles exist potentially as different
combinations of other particles.
So when we really look at ourselves, then, and the things
around us that we took to be so solid, so stable, and so lasting,
we find that they have no more reality than a dream.
Buddha said:
Know all things to be like this:
A mirage, a cloud castle,
A dream, an apparition,
Without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.
Know all things to be like this:
As the moon in a bright sky
In some clear lake reflected,
Though to that lake the moon has never moved.
Know all things to be like this:
As an echo that derives
From music, sounds, and weeping,
Yet in that echo is no melody.
Know all things to be like this:
As a magician makes illusions
Of horses, oxen, carts and other things,
Nothing is as it appears. 9
Contemplation of this dreamlike quality of reality need not
in any way make us cold, hopeless, or embittered. On the